All posts by Thejesh GN

On Data{Meet} we have been talking about the importance of Open Data and quality of it. This year’s winner of the Nobel Prize for Economics Angus Deaton has similar point of view on the quality of open data. Whole article is worth reading, I am quoting a paragraph.

My work shows how important it is that independent researchers should have access to data, so that government statistics can be checked, and so that the democratic debate within India can be informed by the different interpretations of different scholars. High quality, open, transparent, and uncensored data are needed to support democracy.

I have used data from India’s famous National Sample Surveys to measure poverty. Perhaps the biggest threat to these measures is that there is an enormous discrepancy between the National Accounts Statistics and the surveys. The surveys “find” less consumption than do the national accounts, whose measures also grow more rapidly. While I am sure that part of the problem lies with the surveys—as more people spend more on a wider variety of things, the total is harder to capture—but there are weaknesses on the NAS side too, and I have been distressed over the years that critics of the surveys have got a lot more attention than critics of the growth measures. Perhaps no one wants to risk a change that will diminish India’s spectacular (at least as measured) rate of growth?

This meetup was special as this was on my way back from the long drive. Since I was doing quite a bit of Open Data work on my trip, I thought I would talk about the same. So we had a long conversation about how we can contribute while on a long drive.

This is to invite you to a consultation meeting on the first public draft of the International Open Data Charter organised by CIS with DataKind and DataMeet at the CIS office in Bengaluru, on Tuesday, July 28, 2015, at 5:30 pm.

The Charter is being developed by the Open Data Working Group of the Open Government Partnership in consultation with a number of international organisations. Meant for approval and implementation by national governments, the Charter has five key principles:

– Open by Default;
– Quality and Quantity;
– Useable by All;
– Engagement and Empowerment of Citizens; and
– Collaboration for Development and Innovation.

The first public draft of the International Open Data Charter was published in end of May 2015 at the International Open Data Conference in Ottawa, and can be accessed here: http://opendatacharter.net/charter/.

Organisations and individuals are invited to submit comments directly on the Charter page, before July 31.

We are organising this meeting to discuss the context, the drafting process, and the objectives of this document, and to encourage the participants to comment on the existing text of the Charter.

We keenly look forward to your participation in the consultation meeting on Tuesday.

Stories

The India Water Tool Version 2 (IWT 2.0) is an easy-to-use, online tool for companies and other users to understand their water-related risks and prioritize actions toward sustainable water management. IWT 2.0 combines data from Indian government agencies and water stress indicators from the World Resources Institute and Columbia Water Centre.

Stories

Urban Water Blueprint the state of water in more than 2,000 watersheds and 530 cities worldwide to provide science-based recommendations for natural solutions that can be integrated alongside traditional infrastructure to improve water quality. City and utility leaders who embrace both natural and engineered water infrastructure will not only meet future water demand; they will reshape our planet’s landscape for the better.

Stories

The Music Timeline shows genres of music waxing and waning, based on how many Google Play Music users have an artist or album in their music library, and other data (such as album release dates). Each stripe on the graph represents a genre; the thickness of the stripe tells you roughly the popularity of music released in a given year in that genre. (For example, the “jazz” stripe is thick in the 1950s since many users’ libraries contain jazz albums released in the ’50s.) Click on the stripes to zoom into more specialized genres.

Stories

SoilGrids1km is a collection of updatable soil property and class maps of the world at a relatively coarse resolution of 1 km produced using state-of-the-art model-based statistical methods: 3D regression with splines for continuous soil properties and multinomial logistic regression for soil classes. SoilGrids1km is a global soil information system based on automated mapping.